The large and highly renowned Manhattan University has been the epicenter for two weeks of a movement on American campuses in support of the Palestinian cause. Dozens of people were arrested Tuesday evening.
The New York police intervened manu militari Tuesday, April 30 in the evening at Columbia University, the epicenter of the pro-Palestinian mobilization on American campuses, in order to dislodge the demonstrators who had barricaded themselves in a building since the previous night. All the demonstrators were evacuated from the campus, according to American media.
American student anger has spread for two weeks from the large universities of the East Coast to those of California via the South and the Center, reminiscent of the demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the end of the 1960s. In New York Tuesday evening ( around 01:30 GMT Wednesday), it was in riot gear, aided by an intervention vehicle with a ladder, that dozens, even hundreds of police officers, entered the campus. Helmeted officers, climbing the ladder, then entered through a window into the occupied building.
Dozens of people, some wearing keffiyehs, were arrested and placed in police buses, AFP noted. Outside the campus, the crowd was shouting “Free Palestine!”.
“Last night’s events on campus gave us no choice”, wrote the president of the university, Minouche Shafik, in a letter made public asking the New York police to intervene on the perimeter of this private establishment in Manhattan. For two weeks, she and many other university leaders across the country have faced protesters occupying their campuses to oppose Israel’s war in Gaza against Hamas. In his letter to the New York police, Minouche Shafik asks law enforcement to “maintain a presence on campus at least until May 17, in order to maintain order and ensure that no encampments is established.”
Tent “village”
During the night from Monday to Tuesday, a few dozen protesters barricaded themselves in a building, Hamilton Hall. The building was renamed “Hind’s Hall” by the pro-Palestinian group “Columbia University Apartheid Divest”, in tribute to a six-year-old girl killed in Gaza. On their Instagram account, this group denounced a “invasion” of campus. Columbia’s presidency began Monday at “to suspend” administratively students who refused to leave the “village” of tents.
Six months before the presidential election in a polarized country, this student movement has provoked a strong reaction from the political world. Joe Biden “must do something” against these “paid agitators”Republican candidate Donald Trump said Tuesday evening on Fox News. “We must put an end to the anti-Semitism that plagues our country today”he added. “While Columbia University is in chaos, Joe Biden is absent because he is afraid to tackle the subject”, wrote on X the Republican leader of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson in the evening. It has long called for the departure of its president, Minouche Shafik.
Accusations of anti-Semitism
“Forcibly occupying a university building is the wrong approach” and does not represent “not an example of peaceful demonstration”had thundered before the police intervention John Kirby, spokesperson for the National Security Council for Democratic President Joe Biden.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators are demanding that their universities cut ties with patrons or companies linked to Israel. Columbia refuses. These new pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the United States have reignited the electric debate since October between freedom of expression and accusations of anti-Semitism. The country has the largest number of Jews in the world after Israel, and millions of Arab-Muslim Americans.